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Linus Tech Tips apology video - BEST PARTS
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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Linus Tech Tips
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Linus should have employed a professional CEO, Managers, PR and HR years ago, right at the start of the labs expansion.
Their problems in the last couple of years could have been avoided or greatly reduced with better management, and employees not afraid to be open when things go wrong, this will set them back years.
Probably not many to be honest. This will be a minor blip in 12 months time, they way every drama seems to be, but as the business gets bigger and bigger, without having a proper management team the knife edge gets sharper and the risks increase.
And on the issue of harrassment allegations (since all the rumours point to the main problem being a long serving crew member, not a faceless new hire in a back office), you can do everything you can to discourage it but inevitably people will do stupid shit, say stupid shit, they will fuck up, they make mistakes, they are even malicious at times, but if you cant reprimand them or fire them for it because they're your mate, a member of the OG crew or they're popular with the audience then you are going to have a major problem on your hands as problems silently snowball in the background.
Exactly right. It does happen everywhere, more often than a lot of people will admit, if we were all perfectly honest weve all probably said or done something that could be considered harrasment, but in addition to doing everything possible to prevent it, you need the right resources to handle it when it does happen. That means being man enough to fire a friend if they fucked up.
And as you say, sometimes people aren't going to come forward until they've left on bad terms or the problem escalates, you also need to be ready to handle those allegations when they happen. That also means not putting innuendo and 69 jokes in an apology video.
Sometimes I hear people scoff at company wide sensitivity trainings, but we recently had to do training about sexual harassment. A company in my field had a serious allegation of sexual misconduct, and other companies in the area (including mine) scrambled to provide internal training to avoid this kind of public scrutiny. In the three days of training, during the discussion sessions, I was surprised at how uninformed some of my dear colleagues are on this subject. It didn't come from a malicious place, they were simply never invited to take on another person's perspective. Some will only see the certificate we got as a formality, these are the "woke" among us, the more introspective ones. But for others, these trainings can actually be eye opening and meaningful. Yet some others will never learn, but thankfully this was not the case in our small company.
In large part because HR is there to act in the company's interests, not the employees.
Their paid service saw a significant loss in users. Something like 12% before they shut down the counter.
You can still see the count on their Floatplane page here: https://www.floatplane.com/channel/linustechtips/home
As of time of this comment it’s at 36396 and still slowly trending down. It started at over 42000 when the GN video came out.
I'll come back to Techlinked when they post again. I also listen to David (camera operator/writer) and Jon's (ex-marketing) podcast that they have outside of LMG. I still like the personalities. LMG is great at recruiting interesting on-camera people after all
What is the name of the podcast? I wanted to check it out!
It's called "Let's Wing It". The first couple of episodes didn't have their faces on the poster, so they were easy to miss. It's a bit rambly, but it's a successor of sorts to TJM Podcast/Carpool Critics (which I also still listen to on repeat)
Problematically for LMG, the people who subscribe on floatplane and buy their merch make them the most money, and they are not "just watching the videos".
Supposedly Linus didn’t think he could trust anyone else to essentially act as his proxy. And he’s just been bugging Terren for years to come to LTT. And it only now worked out. If you can call all this “working out”
It's not just about trust, professional experienced ceos, who have been educated in business management know how to run businesses, it's what they do, it doesn't matter what the product or service is, that can be learned. Linus was too proud to hand control of his baby over, that's very, very common with businesses that start to grow faster than they can handle and it's a reason why start ups fail despite their successes and promise. Lmg is extremely lucky to have gotten as far and as large as it did without the necessary restructure to go to the next step.
Once you get into the 50+ full time employee range you need pro's on the team because shit will happen, mistakes will be made, people will fuck up, that's unavoidable. Good strong businesses handle it well, it's rough cause sometimes you have to fire an OG team member and close friend and ruin a friendship. It sucks and people will hate you, but that's part of running a large company.
Lmg had been incredibly successful and that's great, kudos the them for that, but you have to have the humility to stand up at some point and day "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing and I need" any business adviser or analyst will tell you that.
Much easier to do when you're not dealing with a narcissist who, if he cant be right no matter how much he doubles down, then he'll atleast make himself look like a victim to get that sweet sympathy feed for his narcissism.
Poor dude inherited a shit show
You are completely right, but I wonder how self aware Linus is. I haven't been watching his channel closely, but I've binged on episodes in the past. I was not aware of his anti-labor views or how he had his employees working on his house - these are things that a non-self aware person does; someone who doesn't understand the optics are bad to the "commoner" who feels they are being taken advantage by business owners. I'll reserve judgement for now but I've found this entire thing very disappointing.
Pretty un-self-aware indeed. He got so distracted/butthurt over internet reactions accusing him of maliciously stealing the prototype... Like obviously not, people are just pissed about the injustice. His ego benefits from the size and influence of his business qua business. But his ego leads him to see himself still as that scrappy YouTuber whose just tryna do what he does, forgetting that he's got greater power now and greater responsibility.
To be fair on the working on his house thing. He's been literally going to his employees houses and installing stuff for them after handing them $5000+ to spend on a processor + whatever they want.